The most burnout-inducing environments I’ve worked in have all had one thing in common: They had a person or class of people that had wormed their way into being in control of everything while being responsible for very little. This left the rest of us to be responsible for the consequences of their decisions while having little to no input on the things we were held accountable for.
The absolute worst company I worked for had this separation as a core philosophy. They had different managers for everything: Product managers to make all of the product decisions, UX managers to make all of the design decisions, project managers to decide when we’d do things and how to check in on our progress every few hours of every day, program managers who thought they were engineers who just didn’t write code, VPs who would choose all of your programming languages and frameworks for you, and on and on. These people would shuffle from meeting to meeting every day with a 2-hour company-paid lunch in the middle (which they ultimately got in trouble for) but wouldn’t ever do any of the work themselves. Meanwhile, if any engineer dared make a suggestion we’d get a long lecture about staying in our lanes. Then when projects were late/wrong/failed or just missed the mark about what the company needed, they would do long post mortems to assign blame to different engineers for doing it wrong. At best, they’d come up with vague statements about how “we failed as a team due to communication issues” or something.
It was the most demoralizing work environment. Every meeting was full of sad, dejected engineers. People would quit without having other jobs lined up because they just couldn’t take it any more.
This is pretty much everywhere I’ve worked at in my 10 years career so far.
I honestly don’t know what to do about it. It seems hopeless and I’ve been avoiding going back to work for the last 18 months. I also wonder if there is something wrong with me because everyone else seems to cope with it somehow and keep on working.
I’ve thought about starting my own business but it’s too much hard work which I don’t think I can pull off.
The idea of going back to employee work makes me feel like shit because I’ll end up in the same environment (since 99% of companies work this way) and I don’t want to go through yet another burnout.
Would love to hear about how others have overcome this.
> I also wonder if there is something wrong with me
There is not, and it's important to understand that. The environment is grinding you down, which can make you doubt yourself. In essence, your mind gets tricked into taking the blame for the situation you're finding yourself in.
In the end, while you might not always be able to modify the environment, you can always move away from it. You're avoiding it - you can see that as a part of you looking out for you. It's an important part, and it shows you that you actually have agency: You can do something, and you _are_ doing something. It also means you could do something else. You can take more control and use your agency in a more directed way. See what actions you can take that make you feel better and more in control.
Resist the urge to blame yourself, but don't blame yourself for blaming yourself: see it like a natural reflex that is there, but that you want get more control over. That itch you don't want to scratch, in order to not damage your skin; when you find yourself scratching, forgive yourself for scratching it, and stop scratching.
Most of all, I'm not a professional. Find a professional to talk this over with. They can help immensely putting the your situation in context and figure out ways to interact with it that make you feel good. It works.
You probably discovered why many SWEs are leaving the industry and going into things like carpentry. It’s nice to have control over the outcome of one’s work. It feels more honest than being a cog in an uncoordinated corporate (and let’s not forget — often juvenile and political) machine.
Yeah my last place was like this, and all the non-engineers sucked at their jobs leaving engineers to pick up the slack on everything from project planning to sprint planning, to engaging with users, gathering requirements, prioritizing tasks, etc.
This despite having an entire product team who was making all sorts of insane non-product decisions (technologies, programming languages, binary storage formats, vendors to outsource to, etc).
The product team was somehow too busy to make it to any meetings with tech leads & devs, despite seemingly not talking to users either since we were left doing so. We'd have 10hrs/sprint of planning meetings, and our product guy would show up for 30 minutes of one meeting. Unbelievable stuff.
Separating things orthogonally into different functions/silos sounds like how stable and large companies are run. Sounds like a recipe for disaster for a startup.
In many cases I believe this is caused by cargo culting big company practices and not realizing how fast you can move at smaller scale by cutting out unnecessary ceremony and empowering those who prioritize building and learning over talking and pontificating.
Yes, I suppose it is cause and effect. Inexperienced managers read about FAANG, or perhaps more likely Basecamp, and decide to copy it. Also having a ton of VC money means you can afford to hire non-productive people too early.
Been in a few places that turned the cargo cult to eleven. Someone brings an article about squads at Spotify and suddenly the team hierarchy changes. Someone discovers a blogpost about how desks on Amazon were made out of doors in the early days and suddenly all new desks are made of doors. Google releases Material design and we have to redesign the whole thing. And there’s also the playground slide and the plastic ball pool.
n=3 here but the amount of straight up nepotism I've seen makes my head spin.
I recently quit a job, without another lined up, at a startup where I couldn't even last a year. The CTO and the entire engineering management layer under him were all friends from high school.
You described the symptoms of psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists in a single sentence. Research these personality disorders. It will bring you peace and explain the majority of malfunctions in the world. Specifically look into the sociopath apathy empath triad.
Highly explanatory, certainly. And knowing about them is arguably much better than not knowing, but I'm not necessarily on board with "bring you peace".
I feel like I run into them a lot, and it's consistently awful handling it in practice, since they seem to delight in refining their skills at social and psychological manipulation, and they position themselves to use the mediocre herd as a weapon.
Some methods of choice seem be:
* cheap, simple lies which take expensive, complex truths to sort out. Equivocating about descriptions used to challenge them.
* stand themselves next to someone/something highly regarded by the group and reframe attempts calling them on their nefariousness into an attack on that
* shameless and blatant denial of world descriptions where their behavior is anything but perfectly normal and justified. (As particularly prominently demonstrated by political leaders of certain major countries in recent years)
* introducing (or corrupting/extending existing) complex rule systems for purportedly noble reasons, then torture language or put forth extreme interpretations to find ways to claim their toxic bidding must be done, but 'It's not I who say that. That's the rules. We all have to obey the rules'. Particularly for justifying damage or conducting systemic coercion against their victims. (Harry Potter readers may wish to think of Dolores Umbridge, in this regard.)
I'm sure I'm missing several important ones too. If anyone has pointers on how to develop skills to reliably defeat these dangerous parasites, I'd love to know. Sadly I expect it's going to remain highly important skills for the foreseeable future.
I have dealt with it too. If you are someone of noble intent who is capable of feeling emotions and doesn't ride the apath line it's hard. Your goal should never be to defeat them, they will smell blood in the water and go after you relentlessly. It's how they operate.
The best advice I have is remain honest, don't play their games, document anything said in unrecordable media, and use the fact that they don't know how to stop being excessively brutal or recruiting others to do so against them if required.
No one has a recipe, each person operating like this has their own way of working. There are common exploitations they will use, but all you can do is laugh internally knowing their flaws. Their biggest weakness is they will destroy people unfairly and eventually cause enough damage to an institution that someone above them will realize those losses eventually. You can't call these things out, again you'll be a primary target. But you can easily get them on paper doing this.
The absolute worst company I worked for had this separation as a core philosophy. They had different managers for everything: Product managers to make all of the product decisions, UX managers to make all of the design decisions, project managers to decide when we’d do things and how to check in on our progress every few hours of every day, program managers who thought they were engineers who just didn’t write code, VPs who would choose all of your programming languages and frameworks for you, and on and on. These people would shuffle from meeting to meeting every day with a 2-hour company-paid lunch in the middle (which they ultimately got in trouble for) but wouldn’t ever do any of the work themselves. Meanwhile, if any engineer dared make a suggestion we’d get a long lecture about staying in our lanes. Then when projects were late/wrong/failed or just missed the mark about what the company needed, they would do long post mortems to assign blame to different engineers for doing it wrong. At best, they’d come up with vague statements about how “we failed as a team due to communication issues” or something.
It was the most demoralizing work environment. Every meeting was full of sad, dejected engineers. People would quit without having other jobs lined up because they just couldn’t take it any more.